Speculative Fiction—an all-encompassing genre created to describe stories of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and other stories that have an element of “What if...” in them. A story in speculative fiction is one that adds an element of the unreal, or asks, what would become of our society if history took a different direction at some important event? Fiction with a little something extra thrown in.—William D. Richards

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Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The Year of the Knife by G.D. Penman

Release date: November 28, 2017

Subgenre: Urban Fantasy Mystery

About The Year of the Knife:

Agent "Sully" Sullivan is one of
the top cops in the Imperial Bureau of Investigation. A veteran witch of
the British Empire who isn’t afraid to use her magical skills to crack a
case. But Sully might need more than a good education and raw power to
stop the string of grisly murders that have been springing up across the
American Colonies. Every one of them marked by the same chilling
calling card, a warning in the form of a legion of voices screaming out
through the killers' mouths: “It IS tHe YEAr oF the KNife.”

Sully’s
investigation will drag her away from the comforts of home in New
Amsterdam, the beautiful but useless hyacinth macaw that used to be her
boss, and the loving arms of her undead girlfriend, in a thrilling race
against time, demonic forces and a shadowy conspiracy that will do
anything to keep its hold on power and ensure that Sully takes their
secrets to her grave, as soon as possible.

G.D. Penman’s imaginative The Year of the Knife is
a fun, fast-paced urban fantasy mystery with an engaging set of
characters, most notably Agent Sully of the Imperial Bureau of
Investigation.

Excerpt:

The tunnel was pitch black and the trains weren’t running there
thanks to the New Amsterdam Police Department’s order to cut the
power, an emergency measure to keep Sully safe. Although safe was a
relative term given that she was tracking a serial murderer through
total darkness. It was a dangerous job, but one that suited Sully
perfectly—certainly better than her earlier stint in the navy or
the retirement in academia everyone seemed to expect from her. The
subway company had made a stink about the impact the outage would
have on their business, but they’d been left no choice in the
matter. Besides, it was the middle of the night—not rush hour—they
would survive the loss of a few hours’ worth of fares.

Sully kept her eyes down so that she wouldn’t give away her
position, they were glowing a dull red, the tell-tale sign that she
had conjured vision enhancing magic—in this case a modified night
vision spell that allowed her to see in the sunless tunnels. She
needed the element of surprise, she was in the killer’s territory
now. The heat signature of a set of footprints led her along the
narrow subway walkways. They were getting brighter the farther in
that she traveled. The NAPD officers on the scene had warned her
that there was a homeless population in the tunnels, so it was
possible that she was chasing one of them instead of her killer but
she doubted it. There was a certain cosmic geometry involved in
magic, and once you knew how to interpret the angles, it only took
simple calculations to work backward from effect to cause. Sully
knew that whoever was casting the spells that had been killing
citizens of New Amsterdam was doing it from down here.

The footprints were glowing brightly now—she was close. All of the
creeping around, the cat and mouse nonsense—it was making Sully
tense. If alchemy classes had taught her professors anything it was
that there were certain substances that reacted violently under
pressure, and one of those substances was Sully. She’d started the
night off angry, and it had only gotten worse after dealing with
the solid wall of ignorance at the NAPD. The few cops that didn’t
treat her like an idiot for being a woman would treat her like an
idiot for being Irish. It was enough to make anyone tetchy. Giving
up any pretense of stealth, Sully shouted into the maintenance
tunnel, “That trick with the trains was clever. Simple thaumaturgy,
transferring the force from the train up to hit the people above.
It takes a twisted kind of mind to come up with something like
that. I like it.”In the tunnel ahead, purple spellfire appeared,
sputtering from someone’s fingertips, presumably the killer’s.
Sully's face split into a wicked grin and she dropped into a low
stance.

About G.D. Penman:

G D Penman writes Speculative Fiction. He lives in Scotland with
his partner and children, some of whom are human. He is a firm
believer in the axiom that any story is made better by dragons. His
beard has won an award. If you have ever read a story with Kaiju
and queer people, it was probably one of his. In those few precious
moments that he isn’t parenting or writing he likes to watch
cartoons, play video and tabletop games, read more books than are
entirely feasible and continue his quest to eat the flesh of every
living species.

About Meerkat Press:

Meerkat Press is an independent publisher committed to finding and
publishing exceptional, irresistible, unforgettable fiction. And despite
the previous sentence, we frown on overuse of adjectives and adverbs in
submissions. *smile*

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